School security cannot be made absolute

The officer was from Sandia Base and was lying on the tarmac in front of Plant 1, after being hit on the head with a rifle butt wielded by a member of an elite air police (the Air Force's military police) unit.

Sandia, in New Mexico, was headquarters for the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (previously known as the Manhattan Project) and Plant 1 was at Bossier Base, an AFSWP nuclear weapons facility in northwestern Louisiana. I was one of the technicians who worked in Plant 2.

These installations had the most intense security the world has ever seen — huge electrified fences, concrete vehicle barriers, .50-caliber machine guns mounted everywhere, 10-inch-thick steel doors, and air police with orders to shoot first and never ask questions at all.

Special badges had to be exchanged for matching badges at various spots before anybody could get into the base, into Plant 1 or Plant 2, or into any of the concrete "igloos" housing an armory of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.

It was the Sandia guy's job to see if he could find a way to infiltrate our security. To this day, I have no idea how he did it, but he dropped a smoke bomb down a vent at Plant 1 before the APs caught him.

That was decades ago, but I always think of him when I hear politicians and others blathering about increased security. If a deranged punk wants to get into a school or anywhere else to get back at the world for treating him so unkindly, locked doors and unarmed security guards will not stop him.

From Tuesday's edition of The Morning Call, we learned that school systems in the Lehigh Valley area have a "unified front" and are telling their students and others that "schools are safe."

I think that kind of rhetoric is counter-productive when children can see with their own eyes that it's a lie. Unless they are imbeciles, they, like those of us with experience in AFSWP, know there is no such thing as absolute security.

As I have argued previously, as recently as last August, many of the cowards who go on murderous shooting sprees have one thing in common. They are sane enough to carefully pick sites where it is unlikely that anybody will be able to shoot back.

They do not go on rampages at police stations or gun clubs. They target places where the law-abiding are sure to be unarmed — a school, a theater, a commuter train in New York City, where only criminals and cops can defend themselves.

Schools are attractive targets because of the "Federal Gun Free Schools Zone Act," which generally makes it a crime for anyone — including teachers, principals and even most school security employees — to exercise the right of self-defense in a school.

That needs to change. It is not necessary for schools to become armed camps; it is not necessary for every hallway to have a pistol-packing security guard, or for every teacher to have a gun in a desk drawer.

It is only necessary for that to be a possibility here and there, and to make it known that it's a possibility.

It is necessary to give the murderous little cowards cause for doubt. We need to put a crimp in their fantasies about having the power to make everybody scramble in terror as they mow down the defenseless, with visions of tomorrow's blaring headlines dancing in their putrid heads.

Gun control fanatics and their idiotic federal law have made it impossible for the slightest trace of self-defense to be exercised by school employees. So, for the time being, our best hope resides with police officers, who are not disarmed by that law.

As reported on Tuesday, in the same story that mentioned the fib that "schools are safe," several local school districts already have arranged for armed police officers to be present in their schools.

That is a step in the right direction, and the story noted how Bethlehem Area School District Superintendent Joseph Roy had a personal confrontation with an armed intruder when he was principal at a high school in Montgomery County six years ago. (The intruder, a student, killed only himself, not others, however, after blasting away at a hallway ceiling.)

Earlier in the week, I talked to Roy about that incident and other matters, and he said Bethlehem's schools have taken steps to be less defenseless. "We have school resource officers at Liberty and Freedom," he said, referring to Bethlehem's two high schools. "They are regular police officers from the city and Bethlehem Township."

Are they, I asked, armed?

"Yes," said Roy. But that is legal only because they also are municipal police officers. "It used to be that having an armed officer in a school made people feel uneasy, but things have changed."

That, of course, is putting it mildly.

We cannot put police officers in every school hallway, school bus, playground and any other location where children may be found in groups.

And as long as we establish pockets where regular adult citizens are prohibited from defending themselves or the children in their care, the deranged punks will find those pockets and they will find ways to infiltrate them.